Ian Ziering Talks 'Outlandish' 'Sharknado'

Ian Ziering didn't hesitate when he took a bite out of the script for Sharknado. With a name like that, who could resist, right?

"When I read the scene where I'm actually chainsawing my way out of the belly of a shark, how could a guy turn that down when that's in the job description?" actor Ian Ziering told CBSNews.com about reading the script for the new original TV movie.

The action-packed, high-seas, shark-filled adventure, co-starring Tara Reid, premiered Thursday night on Syfy, quickly becoming one of the hottest trends on Twitter and Google. To sum up the overall reaction? If you missed it, you missed out.

"It's one of those crazy movies that if you read the script you couldn't even imagine how they were going to direct this because it's so outlandish," Ziering said. "I mean, there are sharks falling out of the sky! How do you shoot that?! It's a movie where Category 5 hurricanes descend on Los Angeles and water spouts out over the ocean, pulls up marine life and floods the inland areas and drop sharks."

Reid and Ziering portray ex-spouses. Ziering's character owns a bar and once the storm arrives, he dedicates himself to saving his ex-wife and their kids from life-threatening tornadoes and everything they drudge up in their wake.

"I spend most of the movie chainsawing sharks and rescuing my family, so it's very heroic," Ziering said.

Ziering said he had a blast shooting the film: "I got to repel. It was a very action-packed movie. It was run and gun. It wasn't a very high-budget movie, but it was lot of fun."

Even Ziering couldn't believe it when Sharknado became one of the top-trending stories on social media Thursday night and into Friday morning.

And it wasn't just social media -- TV critics were all over the film, too. Time magazine critic James Poniewozik, for instance, was on vacation, but felt compelled to write an online post on the movie: "So we must ask different questions of this movie. We must ask: Does it entertain? Does it make us squirm while laughing while reconsidering our commitments to a pescatarian diet? Does it, we must ask above all, give us sharks in a tornado? Yes, yes, and hell yes."